The Baby Jesus hangover cure

My cousin and I stayed up all night not too long ago, drinking bourbon and playing name that tune, because we are dorks. He ran through his MP3 collection, playing songs and giving me hints like, “OK, you once sang one of her songs at karaoke.” Which I think we can agree is totally insufficient.

The next morning we woke up, a little the worse for wear, and switched on the TV. My cousin clicked around a bit until he found the 700 Club, and then stopped.

“Have you ever seen this show?” he asked. “It’s hysterical.”

The host’s hair was pretty hysterical. He’d clearly bought up a couple cases of mousse in the early ’80s, and he was wearing a great deal of orange pancake. His cohost was similarly done up, only with a longer page-boy haircut and about forty virtuous post-childbearing pounds under her church lady suit.

When we came into the program, already in progress, they were conducting long distance healing. I’d never heard of such a thing, either. Basically, what they’d do is put their hands to their temples and squinch their eyes shut, and envision someone in the audience that needed healing. They’d describe the affliction, and then they’d tell the afflicted that the LORD had healed them. Here is an example:

Lady Host: “OK, I can see … you have some kind of a terrible rash? Going up your neck and into your scalp, and it’s very painful. It’s like, some kind of scabies? And the LORD is healing you. He’s taking your scabies. The LORD HAS HEALED YOUR SCABIES AND YOU ARE WELL, AMEN.” And then she’d open her eyes and look all teary. It was a sight to see. And I was so glad she’d picked something disgusting.

“We should ask the LORD to take our hangovers,” my cousin suggested. I thought this was a brilliant idea. We put our hands over our afflicted heads, as the lady host had instructed, and prayed: “Baby Jesus, cure us of our hangovers!”

A moment went by, in which the man and the lady asked Jesus to cure a sprung hip and an upper respiratory infection, but no dice on the bourbon sickness. As they went on to God’s Mailbag, or whatever their next unit was, we let our hands slump to our sides in defeat.

We know it’s not their fault, though. They just couldn’t hear us praying through the massive banks of feathered hair obscuring their ears.